The “fight of the century” will not be remembered as Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao. It will be Ronda Rousey vs. Cris “Cyborg” Justino — if it ever happens.
For years, the two have bickered about how and when they want to meet in the Octagon. Rousey, who fights at 135 pounds, has said multiple times that she’d take on Cyborg if she can make weight.
Cyborg, however, has said the same thing. She fights at 145 pounds and on Wednesday she reiterated that she’d be willing to drop five pounds to see Rousey in the ring.
“Ronda Rousey already cleaned out her division and she’s doing fight number three with Miesha Tate and this shows for us she already cleaned the division,” Cyborg said on ESPN SportsCenter. “When a champ cleans out a division, everybody saw this, the champ goes up to fight somebody else. I’m a champion at 145 and I can drop to 140 to fight her.”
Cyborg said her willingness to drop five pounds is already an unprecedented compromise. She said most champions in Rousey’s situation would move up to a higher weight class having cleaned out their own — an argument that some find null and void if they look at Cyborg’s career, which mirrors Rousey’s in that she’s also cleaned out her division.
Rousey’s biggest concern about fighting Cyborg, however, isn’t her weight but her past steroid use, which Rousey has indicated she believes is still going on.
“I fight in the UFC, in the 135-pound division,” Rousey said after her easy victory over Bethe Correia in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday. “She can fight at 145 pumped full of steroids or she can make the weight just like everybody else without them.”
Cyborg addressed those concerns, as well, on Wednesday, denying that she’s performance-enhancing drugs since she was caught in 2011.
“She cannot say anything about my doping,” Cyborg said on SportsCenter. “It was 2011. I have passed six tests and the same exams she’s doing, because we’re in the same organization now … I don’t think it’s right she can say something she cannot prove.”
Like Mayweather vs. Pacquiao, this fight does seem inevitable. Unlike Mayweather vs. Pacquiao, however, a bout between the top two women’s fighters in the world sounds like it’d actually be interesting, or in the words of Cyborg, “different.”
“You’ll see,” Cyborg added. “Violence.”
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